1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a payment form discrimination method and apparatus for discriminating payment forms for paying taxes or public utilities fees at a financial institution or the like, and in particular to a payment form discrimination method and apparatus that searches for a character string by which forms can be discriminated and discriminates the forms by the search results.
2. Description of the Related Art
The payment of fees, such as taxes or public utilities fees, can be carried out at a place that is convenient for the person making the payment, like a financial institution, a post office, a convenience store, etc. For such a payment of fees, a payment form stating the payment amount is sent to the person who has to make the payment. The payer then takes the payment form to a financial institution or the like, where the payer can pay the fees. There is a strong demand for the automation of such a fee payment process.
Usually, methods for automatically recognizing characters on the payment form are used for automatic payment processing. For this automatic recognition, there is no need to recognize all characters on the payment form. For example, it is sufficient to recognize the payee, the payment amount and the payment time limit on a tax payment form, and there is no necessity to recognize captions or the like. In order to recognize the characters of the relevant portions among the multitude of characters on such a payment form, it is advantageous to register formats of the form in advance, cut out the registered regions from the read in image of the form, and perform character recognition with the registered character types.
Moreover, since there are several types of forms with different formats that can be processed automatically, it is necessary to identify the format type, access the identified format of the form, and carry out a character recognition depending on the form type. The following techniques have been proposed as automatic identification methods of the form type:    (1) Subjecting a group of characters indicating the form type, such as a title on the form (for example, payment notification slip) to automatic recognition, so as to identify the form type.    (2) Extracting rules from the form and identifying the rule type by the format of the rules.    (3) Attaching form discrimination information, such as a barcode, on the form to be recognized, and reading this information to identify the form.
However, these techniques pose the following problems:    (1) The method of recognizing a form title poses the problems that the recognition process takes a long time since the title is in Chinese (Kanji) characters, and there is the possibility of confusion with forms of similar titles. For example, in payment forms for municipal taxes, similar forms may be used for city A and for city B, so that it is not possible to recognize the forms by the title “Local Taxes”.    (2) The recognition with rules takes a long time to process, and there is the problem that when the rule formats are similar, the form may easily be identified incorrectly.    (3) With the method of attaching form discrimination information, the forms can be discriminated reliably, but there is the problem that only those forms can be identified to which discrimination information has been attached. That is to say, it is not possible to identify those forms currently in circulation to which such discrimination information has not been attached.